Happy Next Orbit!

2001 – Images of Io captured on the dawn of the new millennium, January 1, 2001 10:00 UTC (spacecraft time), two days after Cassini’s closest approach to Jupiter.

visualization of 2001AA

2001 – (Near Earth Asteroid Tracking mission) discovers a 1.5 km sized Mars crossing object 2001AA and dubs it the Millennium Asteroid.

1925 – No longer an Island Universe! At a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society; and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Edwin Hubble‘s paper announcing he had found Cephids in “spiral nebulas”
initiated the decline in the belief that our Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Hubble’s discovery would lead to the knowledge that we live in one of many galaxies.

1801 – Guiseppe Piazzi discovered the object between Mars and Jupiter that he called Ceres Ferdinande a (the roman goddess of agriculture). At an estimated 918 miles in diameter it accounts for one third the mass of all belt asteroids combined. Its is 2.767 AU (AU=Earth-Sun distance) and it orbits the Sun every 4.61 years. NASA’s Dawn Mission visited Ceres 2011.

Birthdays

1959 – Abdul Ahad Mohmand, Afghan colonel, pilot, and astronau

1956 – Sergei Avdeyev, Russian engineer and astronaut

1942 – Gennadi Sarafanov, Russian pilot and cosmonaut (d. 2005)

1867 – Mary Acworth Evershed, English astronomer and scholar (d. 1949)